In today's complex world of product manufacturing, there is an ever-increasing need for flexibility: customers want multiple suppliers; suppliers want to engage multiple vendors, etc. In most all cases, the driving forces are time-to-market for a customer's product, the cost of its manufacturing, and the availability of appropriate technology to enable that manufacturing. At the same time, there is a growing desire for “one-stop-shopping”, in which the customer can engage a supplier as a manner of “general contractor”, who will accept their product and information requirements, and then assemble the right type and quantity of assets and capabilities, be they supplier or vendor. The supplier accepts responsibility for the finished product and information results, across all parties involved in its manufacture.
FIG. 1 is an illustration of these relationships. Today, each aspect, or level of assembly for a customer product is built at one or more manufacturing locations, depending upon the complexity of the product. Typically each manufacturing location is an independent entity, run by a dedicated set of business processes and software solutions, especially their manufacturing execution system (MES). This diversity of behavior and systems make it difficult for the customer to ever see an integrated view of their product during manufacturing. More importantly, it prevents any supplier to the customer from achieving an overall view of manufacturing locations and processes, from either a monitoring or control point of view. It also inhibits the supplier from easily tailoring a vendor's behavior on behalf of a customer without disruption to the vendor environment.
This heterogeneous collection of customers, suppliers and vendors produces and consumes a great deal of information that needs to flow up, down and across the supply network. As illustrated in FIG. 3 significant ‘vertical’ integration is required between all of these participants for information such as product order status (e.g. location, schedule, etc.), as well as product quality and technical data (e.g. construction results—tests, measurements, inspections).
At the same time, significant ‘horizontal’ integration is necessary between vendor(s) and supplier to pass information required for correct product flow and construction, and to enable proper oversight by the supplier across the end-to-end product lifecycle (e.g. product order management across vendors and manufacturing stages, as well as technical data supporting product construction—recipes, programs, etc.).
With a diverse set of processes and systems involved, the resulting integration nightmare causes lengthy time-to-market for the customer's products, especially if any customization is required at any point in the manufacturing process. In addition, there is little to no flexibility available to the supplier in their choice and use of vendor production facilities for either specialization or capacity variability.
This integration is further complicated by the need for timely event and characteristic information from each of the manufacturing stages' execution systems to be fed to the supplier enterprise systems, such as order processing and fulfillment, financial management, logistics planning and product/process engineering as illustrated in FIG. 1. Numerous different execution systems drive the need for equally numerous interfaces, adding complexity in upkeep, reduced flexibility, and often inaccuracies in data and synchronization.